Journalism Outsourced To India?

A few people have ask me to comment on this crazy story about hiring reporters in India to cover Pasadena politics. First off, the man running the Pasadenanow.com website is an idiot, because he could have gotten news coverage for free by hiring a few local journalism school students to do the same thing. Now, he's shelling out 20K for two people who can't ask follow-up questions, can have their emails to the local politicos ignored, and whose English writing skills will be questionable at best. If you think that you have to be a good writer to graduate from the Berkeley school of journalism, as one of the Indians claims, you obviously haven't been to grad school lately.

Second, if he didn't like the idea of student interns, then he should have embraced the ideas of Web 2.0, and hired a blogger to cover the beat. We're not talking full time employment to look at video streaming here, plus he would have more editorial control. The website seems to be a daily online model of those free weeklies you find at cafes, with the editorial slant to match, so finding a blogger whose voice matches the slant shouldn't be too hard to do in Southern California. Besides, the website operator thinks that the Indians might eventually do some investigative reporting. Right. By email and teleconferencing? I hope he sets them up with VoIP, otherwise those long distance charges will pile up.

And last, the dude advertised for the positions on Craig's List. We're not exactly getting the cream of the crop answering those ads. I share the concerns of the UCLA and USC professors quoted in the AP article, but none more so than fellow Pasadena resident, Bryce Nelson: "This is a truly sad picture of what American journalism could become."